IBM® Power Virtualization Center (IBM® PowerVC™) is an advanced, enterprise virtualization management offering for IBM Power Systems™. This IBM Redbooks® publication introduces IBM PowerVC and helps you understand its functions, planning, installation, and setup.

IBM PowerVC Version 1.3.2 supports both large and small deployments, either by managing IBM PowerVM® that is controlled by the Hardware Management Console (HMC) by IBM PowerVM NovaLink, or by managing PowerKVM directly. With this capability, IBM PowerVC can manage IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux workloads that run on IBM POWER® hardware.

IBM PowerVC is available as a Standard Edition, or as a Cloud PowerVC Manager edition.

IBM PowerVC includes the following features and benefits:

• Virtual image capture, deployment, and management
• Policy-based virtual machine (VM) placement to improve use
• Management of real-time optimization and VM resilience to increase productivity
• VM Mobility with placement policies to reduce the burden on IT staff in a simple-to-install and easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI)
• Role-based security policies to ensure a secure environment for common tasks
• The ability to enable an administrator to enable Dynamic Resource Optimization on a schedule

IBM Cloud PowerVC Manager includes all of the IBM PowerVC Standard Edition features and adds:

• A Self-service portal that allows the provisioning of new VMs without direct system administrator intervention. There is an option for policy approvals for the requests that are received from the self-service portal.
• Pre-built deploy templates that are set up by the cloud administrator that simplify the deployment of VMs by the cloud user.
• Cloud management policies that simplify management of cloud deployments.
• Metering data that can be used for chargeback.

This publication is for experienced users of IBM PowerVM and other virtualization solutions who want to understand and implement the next generation of enterprise virtualization management for Power Systems.

Unless stated otherwise, the content of this publication refers to IBM PowerVC Version 1.3.2.

Chapter 1. IBM PowerVC introduction

Chapter 2. IBM PowerVC planning

Chapter 3. IBM PowerVC installation

Chapter 4. IBM PowerVC for managing IBM PowerVM

Chapter 5. IBM PowerVC Standard Edition for managing IBM PowerKVM

Chapter 6. IBM Cloud PowerVC Manager

Appendix A. Software-Defined Networking (technical preview)

Appendix B. Useful commands and scripts